1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to document processing environments with large document repositories. More specifically, the present invention relates to a technique for processing off-loaded and/or retrieved documents in a document processing system.
2. Description of the Related Art
A problem associated with the use of known client mailing applications, such as Lotus™ Notes™ or Microsoft™ Outlook™, is that they contain continuously growing document repositories. (Lotus and Notes are trademarks of Lotus Development Corporation and/or International Business Machines Corp., and Microsoft and Outlook are trademarks of the Microsoft Corp.) The repositories continuously grow due to the incoming and outgoing notes or emails, which will be referred to hereafter as documents, which are commonly saved until deleted by a user. Such documents often including large attachments like text documents, graphics or even storage consuming digitized pictures.
In response to this problem, a Lotus Notes application uses a Lotus Domino™ database from which a tool like IBM Content Manager CommonStore™ for Lotus Domino (CSLD) is used to move documents stored in that database to an archive physically located on a different device, such as a tape storage. CSLD thereupon permits access to the archived documents. Domino and CommonStore are trademarks of Lotus Development Corp. and/or International Business Machines Corp.
CSLD also allows to access documents that have been archived from any archive client application (e.g., scanning applications, CommonStore for SAP™, etc.). When documents are retrieved from the archive to a Notes database, a Lotus Notes document is created. SAP is a trademark of SAP AG.
Lotus Notes supports writing of customized code which, for instance, can be used to trigger workflow based on the state of off-loaded documents.
The drawback of the existing approach is that customized code can not be invoked synchronous to an archiving/off-loading and retrieval process.